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UN to Target 'Neglected' Uganda Crisis

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Top Aid Official Calls for Special Envoy, Says Terror Has Displaced 1.7 Million

By John Goddard

Toronto Star
April 3, 2006

The United Nations is to expand its humanitarian intervention in northern Uganda following a direct assessment over the weekend by the world body's emergency relief co-ordinator. Jan Egeland also wants the UN to assign a special envoy to help raise the profile of what he called a "neglected" crisis. But Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni rejected the special-envoy suggestion outright, said Welile Nhlapo, a senior UN official accompanying Egeland on a four-country swing through East Africa.


Instead, Museveni agreed to UN intervention in several new areas. These include advising the Ugandan army on how best to protect civilians from the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, bring LRA commanders to justice and help establish a civilian police and judicial system. "There are few places on earth where terror has affected more people over such an extended period of time," Egeland said of Uganda's northern Acholiland region where fighting has continued almost unnoticed for 20 years, and where Lord's Resistance Army rebels target civilians and have abducted thousands of children as fighters.

"Altogether 1.7 million people have been displaced because of the terror," he told reporters Saturday in Kampala after his visit to the Pader district on the Sudanese border. "In Pader people still fear for their lives when they leave (internally displaced people's) camps and they are not able yet to return to their homes." Egeland's visit, which began with a meeting Friday with the president, comes at pivotal moment in relations between the Museveni government and the international aid community.

Throughout the 1990s, Western governments praised Museveni for bringing stability to most of Uganda, growing the economy and fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic better than other African countries. But lately he has fallen from international favour. Last year the president orchestrated a change to the constitution, allowing him to run for a third five-year term. The elections he won Feb. 23 are being contested in court by opposition leaders who alleged widespread vote-rigging. The fear is that Museveni is turning into another "African big man," like Zimbabwe's dictatorial Robert Mugabe and Ugandan strongman Idi Amin of the 1970s. Aid agencies and donor governments are viewing him far more critically than before.

Last week, a report by 50 international and local aid agencies in the region determined that the rate of violent death in northern Uganda is three times that of Iraq when taken as a proportion of total population. Asked about the report, which the government has disputed, Egeland avoided hard numbers. "In terms of violent deaths associated with the conflict, our statistics show they have actually gone down," Egeland said. "But the number of deaths associated with the conflict is still on an intolerable high ... There are as many people dying in the camps of northern Uganda (from disease) as there were in the camps of Darfur in Sudan." For weeks, the government-owned newspaper The New Vision has been quoting Museveni as saying the conflict is over. But Egeland believes most of the north remains a terror zone.


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FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.